The Media Intelligence Toolkit: Part II

In the second part of our “Media Intelligence Toolkit” blog series, we will dive into metadata and advanced metadata that make up a large part of media intelligence.

The Media Intelligence Toolkit: Metadata

Generating complete advanced metadata is a specialty of a few companies. Transcripts can be obtained using a variety of services, but the rest of your video’s advanced metadata needs to be provided by a specialized company.

Step 1: Obtaining Transcripts

There are various ways to obtain transcripts for your video, including automated services, human transcriptionists, and hybrid services. For the best return on investment, we recommend using a media data provider that uses a hybrid machine-human approach. This enables transcripts to be generated quickly, but with human-level accuracy.

The higher the quality of the transcripts, the more reliable and exact your keyword and search data will be, and again, the lower your costs will be in the long run. Just like it’s in your best interest to have blog posts error-free and optimized for SEO, it’s in your best interest to have search engines crawl the most accurate rendering of your video.

Step 2: Incorporating Transcripts

To upload the transcripts to your video, transcripts should be pasted directly into the description section of the video, or into the HTML of each of the web pages where your videos are hosted. Make sure to take the time to format the transcript according to a standard hierarchy that you would any page. For instance, include Title, H2, bullets, and other organizational page elements that effectively communicate to a search engine that your content is important.

Without applying these page elements, you may be adversely affecting your SEO ranking. Careful not to hide content either, as that will be picked up on by search engines and your SEO ranking will be negatively affected.

Step 3: The Rest, Topics, Keywords, Subjects, Adwords

Getting complete and high-quality advanced metadata is not easy, but cielo24 can provide you with advanced metadata according to your needs. In some instances, clients may only need basic metadata, but in most cases, you will need much more, including captions and transcripts. To be fully prepared for the future of SEO, companies should begin to consider using media intelligence, beyond just captions and transcripts.

Flash and Javascript: Tips for Advanced Metadata

Crawlers tend to have a hard time indexing Flash and JavaScript-generated content. When advanced metadata is generated using JavaScript, Google will likely be unable to read your content. This seriously inhibits your ability to get a good search ranking, especially when pages contain video. The page delivery may be separated from the web content delivery to avoid delayed page loading time.

To communicate effectively to search engines when using Flash and JavaScript follow these guidelines:

1. Asynchronous Content

You may be increasing page loading performance by separating page content delivery from web content rendering. This is often referred to as asynchronous web content rendering, used frequently in AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications. This simply triggers the second stage of rendering by using a resource URL to break up load time.

There are solutions that can make your AJAX web application crawlable by Google and other search engines. One solution is HTML snapshots, which involve appending fragments to the URL in order to allow the crawler to differentiate and index pages with different AJAX-generated content. Implementing HTML snapshots can be a somewhat difficult process though – a better solution is the built-in JavaScript method called pushState, which produces more user-friendly URLs and is easier for developers to implement.

2. JSON-LD Media Intelligence

You may also be familiar with something called JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data or, JSON-LD. JSON-LD is a method of encoding Linked Data using JSON. It was a goal to require as little effort as possible from developers to transform their existing JSON to JSON-LD. This allows data to be serialized in a way that is similar to traditional JSON. In very simple terms, this allows us to implement rich snippets of media quickly and easily.

The really rewarding news here: the instructions are straightforward. However, you may still want to put your webmaster in charge of implementing your advanced metadata. The only thing you want to avoid is doing nothing at all.

Instructions to implement JSON-LD:

• Visit https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/videos to get instructions. Scroll down and copy the code under the ‘JSON_LD’ tab and paste it onto a text editor, and update the default information with your own.
• Once updated, insert the code into the head section of your page.

3. Video Sitemaps

Another way to optimize and best use rich advanced metadata is through the Google Webmaster Tools Video Sitemap. The Video Sitemap is a way to provide Google necessary metadata about your video. This format serves as another method to implement rich video snippets.

Instructions to implement:

• Visit https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/sitemaps, scroll down, and copy the code.
• Open up a text editor on your computer and paste the code there.
• Replace the default data with data from one of your own pages/videos
• To add more pages/videos, add new tags (and all subtags)
• When finished, save the file as video-sitemap.xml.
• Upload to Google Webmaster Tools (Crawl –> Sitemaps –> Add/Test Sitemap)

The exciting news is that while SEO has proven to be a challenge, improved methods of optimizing content and videos are possible through advanced metadata applications. You can find even more in-depth information on video tactics here.

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